1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of wireless telecommunications, and more particularly to the field of short message systems (SMS) and replied messaging techniques.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
One of the more widely used mobile communications technologies globally is known as SMS (from Short Message System). SMS enables users of mobile terminals (mostly, but not only, mobile phones) to send small messages simply and inexpensively to one or more other users on the same or a different mobile communications network. Typically both senders and recipients pay a per-message fee to their service provider, although it is becoming more common for service providers to offer flat rate plans (for example, unlimited text messages for $20 per month). SMS messages are generally limited to 140 characters in length (in fact, this limitation of SMS is what drove the 140 character limit in the now-ubiquitous Twitter™ service), although this limit may vary when different character sets are used; the SMS standard specifies 140 octets, or eight-bit data elements, as a standard short message length, so use of different character-encoding schemes leads to different character length limitations. Further extensions to the SMS concept have been introduced by carriers, in particular the service referred to as MMS (multimedia message service), which allows simple, inexpensive transmission of messages between users that can carry within them multimedia objects such as photos, videos, audio clips, and the like.
Without a doubt, the popularity of SMS-based services has been based largely on their simplicity and their ability to operate on a wide variety of devices. While “smart phones” account for a larger share of mobile devices sold each year, a large majority of existing mobile devices are what are known as “feature phones”, or relatively straightforward mobile phones with a few basic features such as address books, call histories, SMS services, and the like. Thus one can send an SMS to another and be fairly confident that it will be received, since SMS messages are typically sent to mobile devices and essentially all mobile devices are capable of sending and receiving text messages (of course, not all mobile users have subscribed for SMS or text messaging services, and SMS is a store-and-forward service with no guarantee of delivery, so it is not certain that any given message will be received by its intended recipients). The SMS service is deliberately a simple one, which has served both to stimulate adoption and to encourage innovation amongst third parties. To send a message, a user simply selects one or more addressees (or targets), and types in a message of up to 140 characters, and clicks “send” (or equivalent). The SMS system built into the mobile device being used then simply generates one message for each addressee; each message is addressed to that addressee and contains the text message. Neither the identities nor the addresses of the other recipients is sent with any recipient's message (unless of course the sender chose to type the other names in the message itself, which is both expensive and cumbersome—each message has a cost, and a text message that starts with a series of numerical addresses is much less easy to read).
It is commonplace, in more “advanced” communications technologies such as email, to provide users with a capability of listing multiple intended recipients, either as “To:” recipients or as “Copy to:” recipients (of course, “BCC:”, or blind copy, is also well known in the art). This has proven beneficial as recipients can choose to “Reply All”, or can choose to reply to some subset of the original recipients, without having to reenter the names or numbers of each of the addressees. This convenience has not been available in SMS systems known in the art, for the simple reason that the simplicity of the SMS service has prevented it. A recipient of an SMS (or MMS) message that was sent to many recipients will only know that she in particular was a recipient; none of the additional addresses to which the original message was sent is included in a recipient's copy.
It is an object of the present invention, therefore, to provide a system and method for sending short messages with group sending, receiving, and replying capabilities to enable a more “modern” communications paradigm to be used with a very widespread communications technology. Having the ability, as a user or as an application, to note all of the original addressees, and to select options such as “Reply All”, is clearly advantageous over the current art, and would make the SMS text messaging (and the similar MMS multimedia message service) more flexible and more consistent with other prevalent communications modalities.